Reading Comprehension

Reading is a collection of linguistic and cognitive skills that are embedded and hierarchical in nature.

Comprehension Difficulties:Comprehension Difficulties:

• Exist.

• Are not always caused by word recognition and decoding difficulties.

• Can be caused by many different things.

Comprehension Difficulties Exist

For evidence consider:

• Clinical casework on children with comprehension difficulties

• Range of performance on norm-referenced tests

• Results of state and national assessments

Comprehension Difficulties Have Many Causes

• Difficulties with word recognition and decoding• Difficulties with fluency• Difficulties with language

– Speech and language impairments• Differences in language

– Limited language proficiency (e.g. LEP)– Dialect differences?

• Difficulties with written language– Specific genres– Written language register

• Poor short-term and/or working memory

• Lack or poor use of strategies• Difficulties related to prior knowledge

– Lack of relevant prior knowledge– Failure to apply relevant prior knowledge– Application of irrelevant prior knowledge

• Lack of reading engagement• Other factors

– Eye movement problems– Other self-regulatory or metacognitive issues– Others

Comprehension Difficulties Have Many Causes

In some cases, only one of the previously-listed causes may be at work.

In other, and probably most, cases, more than one of these causes is at work.

Preventing and Addressing Reading Comprehension Difficulties

Preventing• Provide effective comprehension instruction throughout

schooling

Addressing• Assess and intervene in the areas that can cause

reading comprehension difficulties *• Continue to provide effective comprehension instruction

Reading Comprehension Skills

• Cause and effect• Classify and categorize• Compare and contrast• Draw conclusions• Fact and opinion• Main idea• Important details• Inferences• Sequence• Bias and propaganda

• Problem and solution• Identify theme• Literal recall• Tone• Mood• Etc., etc., etc.

Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Summarizing• Questioning • Story mapping • Monitoring • Question answering • Graphic organizers • Mental imagery • Prior knowledge • Multiple strategies

Reading Comprehension

• Depends upon what reader brings to the text

• A language process

• A thinking process

• Requires interaction with the text

Improving Reading Comprehension

• Building vocabulary

• Using basal readers

• Activating background knowledge

• Language experience method

• Reading-writing connection

• Learning strategies

• K-W-L

Strategies

1.Connect to the Text

2.Ask Questions

3.Expand Vocabulary

4.Predict & Prove

5.Sense It

6.Decide What’s Important

7. Make Inferences Then Draw Conclusions

8. Summarize and Synthesize

9. Check Your Understanding

10.Build Fluency

More INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES

• Identify similarities and differences• Summarizing and note taking• Reinforcing effort & providing recognition• Homework & practice• Nonlinguistic representations• Cooperative learning• Setting objectives & providing feedback• Generating & testing hypothesis• Questions, cues, & advance organizers

Make Connections

• Making Connections: A Bridge From the New to the Known

• Text to Self

• Text to Text

• Text to World

Asking Questions

• “Questioning is the strategy that keeps readers engaged. When readers ask questions, they clarify understanding and forge ahead to make meaning. Asking questions is at the heart of thoughtful reading.”

• Harvey and Goudvis

Expand Vocabulary

• The larger the reader’s vocabulary (either oral or print), the easier it is to make sense of the text.”

• Report of the National Reading Panel

Predict and Prove

• “Research suggests that when students make predictions their understanding increases and they are more interested in the reading material.”

• Fielding, Anderson, Pearson, Hanson

Decide whats important

• “Thoughtful readers grasp essential ideas and important information when reading. Readers must differentiate between less important ideas and key ideas that are central to the meaning of the text.”

• Harvey and Goudvis

Make Inferences

• Inferring is at the intersection of taking what is known, garnering clues from the text, and thinking ahead to make a judgment, discern a theme, or speculate about what is to come.”

Summarise and Synthesize

• Synthesizing is putting together separate parts into a new whole….a process akin to working a jigsaw puzzle.

• Harvey and Goudvis

Check understanding

• If confusion disrupts meaning, readers need to stop and clarify their understanding. Readers may use a variety of strategies to “fix up” comprehension when meaning goes awry.”

Build Fluency

• Fluency is important because it frees students to understand what they read.”

What Good Readers Do…

• Make Connections

• Visualize

• Infer

• Determine Importance

• Synthesize

Making Connections

How Do Good Readers Make Connections?

• They think about what the story reminds them of in their own lives

• They think about how the story relates to their own lives

• They think about other books they have read• They think about things that happen in the world

How does making connections help me think as I read?

• Making connections helps me understand the story

• When I can think of a similar experience to the one in the story, I can better understand what is happening and what characters are feeling

• When I understand what is happening, I can remember the story and the story is more interesting to read

Visualizing

How Do Good Readers Visualize?

• Create pictures in their head

• Make the words on the page real and concrete

• Create a movie of the text in their head

• Build meaning as they go by visualizing

• Create images from all of their senses

How does visualizing help me think as I read?

• Enhances meaning with mental pictures• Links past experience to the words and ideas in

the text• Enables me to place myself in the story• Strengthens my relationship to the text• Stimulates my imaginative thinking• Keeps me engaged with the text• Brings joy to my reading• Personalizes reading• Allows the words to come alive

Inferring

I wonder…Could it be?

How Do Good Readers Infer?

• Read between the lines

• Make own discoveries without the author directly stating

• Use text clues, prior knowledge, and questions to come up with a conclusion

• Create meaning based on own notions

How does inferring help me think as I read?

• Draw conclusions based on clues in the text• Make predictions before and during reading• Surface underlying themes• Use implicit information from the text to create

meaning during and after reading• Use the pictures to help gain meaning

Determining Importance

How Do Good Readers Determine Importance?

• Get the bigger ideas and themes• Use text features and clues to help them

figure out the important information• Some features and clues include: italicized

words, pictures, graphs, key words, and headings

• Always look over the entire selection to get an idea of what the topic is about

• Carefully highlight key information

How does determining importance help me think as I read?

• It helps me to not have to memorize the whole text

• It helps me figure out what is important information and what is not important to remember

• It helps me figure out what the text is about as a whole before

• It helps me to remember to stop and ask myself if what I am reading makes sense

• It helps me to look at features such as: bold words, italicized words, pictures, captions, headings, graphs and know that I should pay attention to these words

Synthesizing

How Do Good Readers Synthesize?

• Take individual pieces of information and combine them with our background knowledge

• Form a new picture or ideas from the pieces of information

• Create an original idea• See a new perspective• Combine the strategies of making connections,

visualizing, questioning, inferring, and summarizing

• Ask ourselves, “How has our thinking changed from reading the text?”

How does synthesizing help me think as I read?

• Take in a lot of different facts, think about them, and learn something new

• Sift through a lot of information, take out the key ideas and put them together to get the overall sense of the reading material

• Weave together what I read and my own ideas into new, complete thoughts

• Use the prompts: – I have learned that…– This gives me an idea…– Now I understand that…

* Note: There is not necessarily a one-to-one mapping between causes of reading comprehension difficulties and most effective approaches to addressing them. For example, the best way to improve reading comprehension for a child with weak short-term memory may be to improve reading comprehension strategy use.

Important Instructional Strategies for Important Instructional Strategies for Preventing and Addressing Preventing and Addressing Comprehension Difficulties*Comprehension Difficulties*

1. Appropriate attention to underlying or accompanying skills

2. Wide reading 3. Language exposure4. Language intervention5. Instruction in comprehension strategies6. Knowledge building7. Engagement fostering8. Miscellaneous (-:)

* Depending on the student, the

difficulty/ies, the goal. . .

1. Appropriate Attention to Underlying or Accompanying Skills

• Word recognition and decoding• Reading fluencyBut also,• Intentional/functional knowledge • Concepts of print• Phonemic Awareness • and so on

2. Wide Reading

3. Language Exposure

• Extensive exposure to written language

• Exposure to those -- and all of those -- types of text we want students to be able to comprehend

• Exposure to, and instruction about, rich vocabulary

Effective vocabulary instruction. . .

• Involves lots of time spent reading• Involves lots of rich talk and talk about text• Teaches important words• Teaches conceptually-related words• Relates new words to known words• Exposes children to words multiple times in

multiple meaningful contexts• Raises word consciousness

Semantic Word Map:

Farms

What They Do

Grow plants for people or animals to eat or useRaise

animals for people to eat or use

Animals

cows, pigs, chickens, sheep,

ostriches!, fish. . .

Crops

corn, wheat, soy beans, rice, fruit, vegetables. . .

Equipment

silo

barn

plow

Tractor

Milking machines

(Rupley, Logan, & Nichols, 1999; Duke & Bennett-Armistead, 2002)

Concept Wheel:Hibernation

Sleep

Rest

Winter

Dens

Low heart rate

Bats

Bears

Turtles

Garter snakes

Toads

Hibernation Sleep

BearsWinter

(Rupley, Logan, & Nichols, 1999; Duke & Bennett-Armistead, 2002)

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 12-48

K-W-L Strategy Sheet

Word Web

Categories: What is it?Properties: What is it like?Comparisons: Same/DifferentIllustrations: What are some Examples?

Concept of Definition:

(Schwartz & Raphael, 1985)

4. Language Intervention

• A wide range of language interventions exist.

• This is normally the domain of speech and language pathologists.

• Intervention may occur at many levels, including the phoneme, word, sentence, and extended text level

One outside-the box language intervention: Ambiguity training (Yuill, 1996)

• “Defining and finding words with double meanings (e.g. bank, fan)

Introduction explaining puns (e.g., What’s black and white and red all over?)

• Explaining sentences with double meanings (e.g., The mayor asked the police to stop stealing.)

• Further work on explaining jokes beyond the word level

• Given word compounds, with double meanings, inventing meanings different from the usual meaning (e.g., sausage roll, watch dog)

• Communication game: One child describes a picture in such a way that others can work out which picture in an array is referred to (e.g., “umbrella” would be an inadequate description for an array of a red and a yellow umbrella) (e.g., see Pratt & Bates, 1982).

• Given a word pair, such as “cow-horse,” thinking of a clue so that a peer can pick out one of the words (e.g., “milk” would prompt cow). Word pairs are either similar in meaning (e.g., river-ocean) or dissimilar (e.g., wash-give) (see Asher & Parke, 1975).Evaluating good and poor clues.

• Explaining metalinguistic jokes• Finding key words to help understand abstract

stories (see Yuill & Joscelyne, 1988, for examples)” p. 211

Instruction in Comprehension Strategies

Some key strategies:• Generating questions• Thinking aloud• Monitoring and adjusting as needed• Attending to and uncovering text structure• Activating and applying relevant background

knowledge, including predicting• Drawing inferences• Constructing visual representations

• Summarizing

8. Miscellaneous

• Rich texts• Text discussion

– Questions and questioning (teacher and student)

– Think-alouds (teacher and student)– Other

• Lots of opportunities for meaningful writing• Screening and treatment for sensory / perceptual

issues• Authentic literacy events

Memory Deficits

• Often, students with learning difficulties have memory deficits that make recognizing and recalling information a struggle. These memory deficits have a significant impact on their learning. (Levine, 2002)

Strategy

• A successful strategy that addresses memory deficits is a technique called mnemonics. Mnemonics helps students link prior knowledge with newly learned information.

• (Scruggs & Mastropieri, 1990)

• (Algozzine, Ysseldyke, & Elliott, 1997)

Special Approaches

• Multisensory methods– Orton-Gillingham– Wilson– Fernald– Others

• Reading recovery

• Direct instruction

• Using computers

The Writing Process

common modes: of Writing

• narration,

• definition,

• description,

• comparison/contrast,

• and argumentation;

Five Stages of the Writing Process

• Prewriting

• Drafting

• Revising

• Editing

• Publishing

Prewriting

Think, Think, Think…– Who is my audience?

• My classmates, teacher, a community member, a younger student…

• Do they have any knowledge of my topic?

• Will I need to provide background knowledge?

– What is my purpose?• Am I writing to provide information, to persuade, to find out

information, or to tell a story?

Prewriting

Think, Think, Think…– What do I want to say?

• What are the requirements that I have to have?

• Do I need to research information to complete my writing?

– How do I want to say it?• Am I writing a letter, creating a book or PowerPoint, an essay…

– What graphic organizer will I use?• Brainstorm ideas on a piece of paper, create a web, put the

information into a Venn Diagram…

Strategies for prewriting

• free writing

• brainstorming

• outlining

• mind-mapping/clustering/word-mapping

• journaling

• talking with others; bouncing ideas around

Prewriting

Sample of a Web

Prewriting

Sample of a Venn Diagram

Prewriting

You may create your own graphic organizer or choose and print one from the websites below.

Education Place

Teachnology

Write Design Online

Teacher Vision

Curry School

Prewriting

Show me your work!

Choose a topic that interests you. You will need to complete the prewriting stage. This may be something you did over the summer, a sport that you like, or anything you can think of. Go through the steps of the prewriting stage. Refer to your handouts if you need help.

Drafting

Write it down…– Are my thoughts organized?

• Do I stick with the same idea throughout my writing?• Do I know what order I want to say things in?

– Which ideas do I want to develop?• On your prewriting identify the ideas which you must use, might use,

and will not use. • Do not cross anything totally out. You may decide at a later time to

use it.• What ideas should I develop further?

Drafting

Write it down…– In what order do I want to say my ideas?

• On your prewriting, number your thoughts or ideas. Place them in the order that would make the most logical sense.

• If you are dealing with time, make sure they are in chronological order.

– Did I skip lines?• This will allow room for yourself and others to make corrections.

– Did I label everything?• My name is on the page and all pages have a page numbers.

Drafting

Now you try…

Take your prewriting that you completed previously, and begin drafting it. Remember, this is not a time to worry about spelling or other errors. This a time to get your thoughts on the paper. The other stages will help you with the grammatical and spelling errors. Be creative!

Revising

Improve your writing…– Are my details clear?

• Are my words descriptive?• Did I use repetitive words?

– Should I add or take out parts?• Do I need to explain more?• Is there something missing that I should include?

– Is my writing in a sensible order?• Does my writing need to be in time order?• Does the information need to be presented in a way that is easy for

others to follow?

Revising

Improve your writing…– Have I used the best ideas or words?

• Am I showing others that I know what I am writing about?

• Have I used the best examples or words to describe my ideas or thoughts?

– Is my writing in a sensible order?• Does my writing need to be in time order?

• Does the information need to be presented in a way that is easy for others to follow?

Revising

Keep it up…

You have been working really hard on your writing…now make it look your best! Read over your writing. Make sure the content makes sense to the reader. You may need to read it out loud to yourself. Consider reading it more than once.

Editing

Correct your work…– Have I used complete sentences?

• All of my thoughts are complete.

• There are no run-ons.

– Are my language conventions correct?• Spelling

• Capitalization and punctuation

• Grammar

– Have I used editing marks to make corrections?• Remember to look in your writing folder if you forgot what to use.

Editing

Correct your work…– Have I had at least two people edit my

paper?• Choose two people in the classroom,

that are on the editing stage. If no one is, you may choose to look over your work again. You may also write in your journal if you cannot find someone to edit your work. Be sure to check after a few minutes to see if someone is ready.

– Editing others work…• Make sure to check for the same items

you did when editing your own work.– Check for complete sentences, check

the language conventions, and use editing marks for corrections.

Editing

Editing Marks…

insert

indent

check spelling

delete

capitalize

lower case

insert period

Editing

Here we go…

Your writing has come a long way. You need to make sure to fix the errors. On your revised copy, be sure to make any necessary corrections. Refer back to your writing folder if you need help. You must edit your paper along with two of your classmates.

Publishing

Get ready to share…– Did I do my best work?– Did I include a title (if needed)?– Is my final copy neat?– Should I illustrate the pages?

• You may use the computer to create this or draw your own.

– Do I need a title page with illustrations?– Should I read it out loud?

Publishing

The finish line…

Take your writing through the final stage. You may choose to either type your writing or hand write it on paper. Be sure to reread your work before turning it in. Self-assess your work using the rubric given to you. Show your BEST work!

Publishing

Typing your work…– Sign up for a time to get on the computer.– Be sure to reread your work. Spell check is

not always reliable.– Look in your writing folder for requirements

when typing your work.

Publishing

Handwriting your work…– If you are given a certain type of paper to write on, make sure

you have it. – There should be no errors in your work. Erase all mistakes so

that you cannot see them. – Use your best handwriting. – Be sure to reread your work before turning it in.– You may also type your work if you would like.

Publishing

Turning it in…– What order does my work go in?

• Final Copy• Any Drafts (Please label these pages with DRAFT

at the top).• Prewriting• Rubric